Monopole Production and Glasma Decay

Abstract

It has been discussed that quark gluon plasma is produced following the rapid decay of coherent color gauge fields generated immediately after high energy heavy ion collisions. But there are no convincing mechanisms known for the rapid decay of the gauge fields which satisfy phenomenological constraints on their lifetime. We show by using classical statistical field theory that the gauge fields rapidly decay into magnetic monopoles. For comparison, we show how fast they decay into Nielsen-Olesen unstable modes. We find that the rapid decay of the glasma is caused by the monopole production.